Speaking on his first morning media round as Tory Party Chairman, Greg Hands told TimesRadio that his new deputy Lee Anderson “is a fantastic asset for the party. He is a man of great integrity.”

Greg was then quizzed on some of Lee’s views, including nurses using food banks, and previously calling the Tory Party “ghastly“. Guido’s very pleased with Lee’s appointment, though as fellow Tory MP Nigel Adams tweeted yesterday, here’s hoping the promotion isn’t designed to rein him in…

First Anthony Mangnall, now Greg Hands.

Speaking last night at a digital event in Parliament, Hands became the latest MP to take a swipe at jungle-bound Matt Hancock, joking how he once asked an Alexa demo unit who Hancock was, only for the device to claim he was a fictional Australian soap star. To be fair, the reality’s now not far off.

A decent gag, Guido hands it to Greg… 

Congratulations to Greg. It’s his third appointment to the same role on six years…

BEIS minister Greg Hands is quickly becoming a star performer at the government despatch box. After his last showing in January rebutting the opposition’s VAT motion, today he tore Ed Miliband a new one over his own energy record in government after the ex-Labour leader said the Tories needed to get on with a “green energy sprint”. 

“We heard about the ‘green energy sprint’. It’s absolutely extraordinary, since he was the Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change in 2010 we have increased the proportion of our electricity generation coming from renewables from 7% to 43%. Now in any normal terms that would be a sprint, but it’s also a marathon in the sense we have done that over a period of 12 years – almost a sextuppeling Mr Speaker if I might.”

“He talks about nuclear, Mr Speaker, but he will remember the 1997 Labour manifesto when they said they saw no economic case for new nuclear power stations, and now he has the cheek Mr Speaker to come to the dispatch box today and urge we get on with nuclear!”

The debate was sparked by an urgent question from Lee Anderson on fracking, in which the minister did not go any further than the already-stated position that Cuadrilla is perfectly within its right to request a delay to the concreting of gas wells. It may not be necessary for the government to u-turn on this, however.

Today it emerges a new gas field under the North Sea has produced its first gas just off East Anglia, with more such developments on the way to help boost the country’s energy security. The gas was secured by IOG, an offshore exploration and production company who say gas from its Blythe well started flowing into the UK gas grid at the weekend, and its second is set to start producing gas within days. Could this, plus Boris’s trip to Saudi, be enough to prevent the government having to u-turn on fracking…

Greg Hands delivered the appropriately named winding-up speech to Labour’s opposition motion, in which he absolutely slammed them for playing “student politics”, and focussing on procedural trickery rather than policy amending. Among the best quotes were:

• “Labour doesn’t have a plan, they have a four-page motion. A four-page motion is not a plan”
• “This is a student union tactic which they well-rehearsed during the Brexit years”
• “With the departure for the member of Islington North as leader of the Labour Party I thought it might have a return to serious opposition politics”
• “They have completely lost the plot into their own world of procedural gobbledygook”

Hands’ recanting of Labour’s day-by-day comms strategy was almost Hague-esque…

It seems trade minister Greg Hands has caught Mordaunt-itis, embarrassing the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesperson over his incorrect EU trade figures. Guido’s previously fact checked the myth of a collapse in UK-EU exports after The Observer claimed Brexit had caused a 68% drop in trade in January. As Hands points out, this was primarily over border restrictions introduced in the wake of the Alpha variant’s spread…

In February, Dover Port said “A month on since the end of the Brexit transition period, the Port of Dover is pleased to already be welcoming over 90% of the freight traffic volumes typical of this time of year” 

Hands later said he’d been expecting the proficiently-anti-trade Smith to come armed with deliberately out-of-date data and came armed with the latest figures. As Hands points out, Alyn Smith is the most anti-trade MP in the Commons, being just one of two to be against the EU-Japan FTA…